Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt Are Pumping Millions into an Ed Tech Startup

To this day, the chief exec at EverFi, an education software startup based in Washington, D.C., boasts about an initiative he backed in the ’90s as a member of the state legislature in Maine that provided laptops to every seventh grader in the state. (He ran for office while still a student at Bowdoin College in 1994—and won.)

Davidson’s enthusiasm for technology in schools has not diminished. On Wednesday, his company will announce a $40 million series C funding round led by a couple of tech tycoons and other firms: Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazonamzn; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Alphabet (née Google) goog; and venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates and Rethink Education.

Founded in 2008, EverFi has raised $61 million to date including the latest round. Other participants include Advance Publications, Rethink Impact, and existing investor Allen & Co.

“We’re trying to get the private sector to really engage in local education,” Davidson says of his venture.

Indeed, the company has partnered with organizations ranging from the NHL to the NFL, while tapping also into the corporate social responsibility arms of big companies like Intelintc, American Expressaxp, and U.S. Bank usb, to get its learning software into school systems across the country.

Earlier this month, Davidson participated in an eduction task force at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo. You can read more about the results of that summit here.

For more on technology in education, watch:

Beyond its network of 20,000 K-12 schools in the United States and Canada, EverFi also sells its product—called Foundry—to universities such as Harvard, MIT, the University of Michigan, and Stanford University. These institutions use the company’s tech to meet compliance requirements by educating students on subjects such as alcohol abuse and sexual assault.

EverFi recently agreed to buy LawRoom, a competitor in the colleges market. Davidson says he plans to use some of the latest fundraising round to complete that acquisition.

Although Davidson declines to reveal the company’s revenue, he says the business is profitable. About a third of the business focuses on corporate sponsorships for schools, he says. Another third involves selling its prevention programs to universities. And the remaining third goes to companies seeking to teach their employees about topics like personal finance and workplace behavior.

Davidson sees this last portion as a big growth area for the firm. Customers currently include Acxiom acxm, Barracuda Networks cuda, Samsung ssnlf, and SurveyMonkey surveymonkey.

“It’s a big opportunity,” he says. “And it’s getting more complicated on all sides of the ball every day.”

How to Revitalize Schools With Tech

When Adam Miller sent his children to public school in Los Angeles, he realized just how behind the times the institution was in terms of its technology. So he did what any reasonable parent might do. The chief exec and founder of Cornerstone OnDemand csod, an HR software company, petitioned along with other parents, played the squeaky wheel, and won a minor victory. The group persuaded the school to install a smartboard in the library.

Nobody used the thing. “It didn’t get turned on for an entire year,” Miller told a closed-door gathering of top educators, technologists, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and investors that met to discuss education reform at the Aspen Institute as part of Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech Conference on Tuesday. The task force—numbering 28 people in total—was spearheaded by Walter Isaacson, CEO of the institute, Alan Murray, editor of Fortune, and Susanna Schrobsdorff, chief strategic partnerships editor at Time.

The L.A. school’s tech integration problem didn’t end there, according to Miller. Each new initiative seemed to meet with failure. iPads for teachers? The tablets collected dust. Laptops and projectors? The duds barely gained traction. Finally, the school brought in a local organization called PlanetBravo—and that’s when everything changed.

PlanetBravo, a computer training program and summer camp, taught technology to the students, as well as the teachers, in one session per classroom per week. Whenever a new piece of hardware broke, the team fixed it. Whenever a person had a question, the team answered it. “Now the students generally say their favorite class during the week is that tech class,” Miller said, eager to share an all too rare success story.

Miller was just one of the more than two dozen experts who spent their morning tucked away in a conference room during the event to discuss the state of education, and to offer ways to improve it. (He and the rest missed out on main stage talks by Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intelintc, and Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap.) Others participants in the task force included Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code; Mark Hoplamazian, CEO, Hyatt Hotels Corporation h; Mimi Ito, cofounder of Connected Camps; Hadi Partovi, cofounder of Code.org; Reshma Saujani founder and CEO of Girls Who Code; James Tynan, vice president of strategy and operations of Khan Academy; and Dennis Yang, CEO of Udemy, among others.

A common theme of the day’s deliberations: Though technology continues to disrupt industries ranging from media to manufacturing to banking, it seems to have left the world of education relatively unscathed. People have been mostly stuck learning in a centuries old model leftover from the Industrial Revolution.

“How do we make sure it’s not just ‘do good, feel good’ philanthropic stuff, but people who are real entrepreneurs like you all who are building new companies,” said Isaacson later on stage, delivering an appeal to the conference’s affluent, influential, and business-minded audience. He urged the attendees to “not just build a better dating app” but to “do well by doing good” through socially conscious, sustainable capitalism aimed at EdTech.

Barbara Jenkins, superintendent of Orange County Public Schools, presented the task force’s recommendations alongside Isaacson. The final list was the product of more than two hours of whittling and refining. (The group had graded each one on a bell-curved scale of A through F, rather appropriately.)

“I think they set a wonderful platform, a foundation for what is to come,” Jenkins said of the suggestions. In short, they included access to infrastructure, communication, investment, and emphasis on computer science. In the language of the brainstormers:

No. 1: Ensure that all public school students have high-speed internet access, devices and tech support at school and at home.

Bring reliable infrastructure and support to all communities to promote digital learning, working with NGOs, government and the private sector. Alongside delivery, provide cultural understanding of safety and security regarding the internet.

No. 2: Start a national campaign to showcase and expand excellence in learning innovation.

Transform the classroom itself to promote true personalized learning and use of technology in adaptive learning spaces. These models require serious investments in R&D and around all aspects of the classroom experience. Those investments include training and incentives for schools, teachers and districts to adopt and scale to ensure all students benefit equitably.

Integrate computer science into school curriculums so that students are exposed to fundamentals early on. Ensure that every high school offers a funded and credited course, with a focus on underserved students including girls and students of color.

“The main thing is not to look at this as a report out, but as a challenge for you to do something,” Isaacson exhorted the tech savvy execs in the audience. “You should look at each of these four things and say what am I actually going to dedicate myself to do over the next 12 months.”

Fortune Brainstorm Tech is, in many ways, the perfect place to make such a plea. Because the world doesn’t need another smartboard. What it needs is smarter boards.

How AltSchool Experiments in Education

A version of this post titled “AltSchool’s education experiment” originally appeared in Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter.

Last week I visited AltSchool, the San Francisco-based education-technology firm that has begun its corporate life by operating a small number of private “micro-schools.” AltSchool’s CEO, Google goog veteran Max Ventilla, explained why his toddler of a startup—it began in 2013—began with baby steps. Other “ed-tech” companies have tried building broadly applicable technologies to achieve incremental growth. Almost all have failed. By beginning with small schools, Ventilla said, AltSchool can aim revolutionarily for the middle ground of teacher autonomy and accountability.

In other words, it can experiment. “We’re kind of flying the plane while we’re building it,” Ventilla said. This is a tried and true cliché of Silicon Valley product development. The old way, think Microsoft msft, was to tinker for years on complicated software and then ship it at once. The new way, think Facebook fb, is to iterate and then ship frequently.

The difference is that AltSchool is experimenting with the lives of children, not a better way of tagging beer-bust photos. The reason the plane-flying analogy amuses is that no one in their right mind would tinker with an airborne plane. Yet AltSchool asks parents to pay for the privilege of supplying their children as guinea pigs.

For more on ed-tech, watch:

Some of what it is doing is fascinating. AltSchool has raised $133 million, and it has developed unique technology that borrows from current tech-industry memes. A student “playlist” shows all the topics and tasks accomplished. This not only allows a teacher to focus on unknown areas but also, cleverly, avoids wasting a child’s time rehashing completed material. A “parent portal” provides a stream like Facebook’s News Feed to keep parents up to speed on their child’s progress.

I’m intrigued by AltSchool, and my biggest gripe, which I shared with Ventilla, is that he’s not applying his energy, smarts, and vast amount of available capital to improve public schools, especially in San Francisco. He hopes the company’s “platform” eventually will be available to public schools.

Rebecca Mead’s meticulously reported feature in the current issue of The New Yorker, “Learn Different,” discusses this and many other pros and cons of AltSchool’s approach. I highly recommend it if you’re half as intrigued as I am.

Senator Asks Google Why it’s Tracking Student Information

This subject first came to light in December when the Electric Frontier Foundation filed a complaint against Google goog. Fortune reported that the EFF accused the company of collecting information about students’ Internet habits without their or their parents permission, a practice which would violate both Google’s promises to consumers as well as FTC rules.

It caught Senator Franken’s attention, prompting him to write a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai in which he wrote:

I am concerned that this collection of data may enable Google to create detailed profiles of students and ultimately target advertising to them or use the profiles for other non-educational purposes without the students’ knowledge.

The director of Google apps for education, Jonathan Rochelle, wrote a post in December responding to the EFF’s claims saying, “While we appreciate the EFF’s focus on student data privacy, we are confident that our tools comply with both the law and our promises, including the Student Privacy Pledge, which we signed earlier this year.”

Despite Google’s reassurance, TechCrunch reports that Franken had numerous questions for Pichai. He asked what kind of information is collected if a student is signed into GAFE (Google Apps for Education) or using a Chromebook provided by Google, but isn’t using GAFE services. He also asked why this information is collected and whether it’s used for educational purposes or for business purposes unrelated to educational technology.

He praised Google for its efforts in education, but wants the company to clarify to what extent information is being collected and used without the students’ or parents’ consent.

When Fortune reached out to Google, a company spokesperson only had this to say: “We’ve responded to the EFF in detail and we’re very happy to provide Senator Franken with more information.”

Why Ed Tech Is Currently ‘The Wild Wild West’

The massive disruption of the education industry is well underway, but the biggest tremors are yet to come—disruptions so dramatic that many universities will cease to exist in the next few years.

That was the conclusion of the panelists at the Fortune Global Forum’s session on Ed Tech. Said Alan Arkatov, a professor in USC’s Rossier School of Education: “Think Jurassic Park,” he said. “I would say 500 to 1,000 colleges across the country will not be around, or will have morphed into something else, because they do not have a sustainable business model. The market will annihilate those folks.”

Two of the would-be annihilators—Dennis Yang, founder of Udemy, and Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera, weren’t disagreeing. Yang’s company, which allows anyone to offer a course and relies on the market to sort out the good from the bad, now offers 30,000 different classes in 80 languages. And Koller says Coursera has reached 16 million “learners,” with much of the company’s growth coming from outside the U.S.

But neither company offers online degrees, instead focusing on practical and career-focused skills such as computer programming—and, increasingly, corporate training, which they see as another area ripe for disruption. Yang actually compared its current state to “taking a rusty nail and putting it in your eyes.” He continued: “Most of the solutions for corporate training were built and designed for the administrator, not the learner.”

So having, say, a top professor from a top university teaching employees virtually would improve the experience, says Koller. “Our brands are so strong. Everyone understands these are the top people in the field offering the kind of content that companies pay a lot of money for.”

It’s not clear yet, however, whether these companies can actually make money with their current business models (Udemy charges approximately $25 to $100 for a course and shares revenue with the professor; Coursera charges for a credential rather than the course itself). What is clear is that the changes in the education world will continue to accelerate. “It’s a little bit of the Wild Wild West right now,” says Arkatov.

Chegg buys InstaEDU in transition away from book rentals

CheggCHGG, a book rental company, does not believe in the future of book rentals. Sure, the company made $60.5 million from that business last year, but CEO Dan Rosensweig knows the future Chegg, which went public seven months ago, is not in book rentals. That’s why he’s been busy transitioning Chegg into new businesses, selling a variety of digital services to Chegg’s 13 million active users. The company hopes to leverage the data it has around its members to pair them with service providers in the recruiting, financial aid, study aid, and school supply industries.

It sounds viable, but Wall Street has not been convinced. Chegg’s shares currently trade at a 55% discount to their IPO price.

But there’s hope: The street reacted positively to the company’s latest development. Today, Chegg announced it acquired InstaEDU, an online tutoring service, for $30 million. Shares of Chegg traded slightly up by 3.33% today.

InstaEDU is the seventh acquisition Chegg has made in the last four years. Because of Chegg’s large audience of students, the company has become an attractive acquirer for early stage ed-tech startups. “We’re able to take smaller companies and put them on steroids because of our reach and our data,” Rosensweig says.

Founded in 2011, InstaEDU provides on-demand online tutoring services for students, who pay by the minute. The company had raised a total of $5.1 million in venture funding from Social + Capital Partnership, Battery Ventures, and angel investors. It was in the process of raising its Series B round of funding at a valuation of around $30 million when Chegg made its offer.

The two companies had already integrated their software together months ago, and through that partnership, Chegg referred 75,000 potential customers to InstaEDU. “Once they plugged it into Chegg, they saw they could be a major global player and knew they were going to need Chegg one way or another,” Rosensweig says. With the acquisition, Chegg will offer tutoring services alongside its study tools (acquired through a company called Cramster), college admissions guides for high schoolers (acquired through a company called Zinch), and local deals on school supplies (acquired through a company called Campus Special).

Still, a public company under transition is a tricky sell to investors. Rosensweig understands that it may take time for Chegg’s stock to turn around. “Its not unfair to say investors prefer simple stories. Chegg is not a simple story yet, but it’s becoming that,” he says. Three years ago, Chegg made 100% of its revenue from textbook rentals. Last quarter, digital products made up 24% of total revenue. Chegg plans to bring in more than $100 million in revenue from digital-only products this year, Rosensweig says.

The company will continue its acquisition streak, seeking out startups offering education-related services that have supply but need demand. “We will look at services that could use a turbo charge, with our brand and our reach,” Rosensweig says. “More and more of them are recognizing that without reach it will be difficult to scale on their own.”

In the meantime, Chegg isn’t giving up on textbook rentals entirely. That’s what the site is known for, after all, and that reputation has helped the company register new users, and ultimately, grow its digital business faster, Rosensweig says.